Yearly Archives: 2007

What’s it look like to you? The price swings in the S&P; 500 over the last 4 months seem to display the natural complex system self-controls of the financial system ‘fishtailing. Systemic failure is generally the consequence of pushing self-correction mechanisms beyond their response limits.

Hi folks, …this week’s global run on credit seems like a casebook example of how a natural system failure to provide growing physical returns on investment would effect financial commitments for endlessly growing financial returns. They naturally conflict. One thing we can do is watch it closely, so others may learn from our experience. Because systemic collapse is a

(see also #1 Issue in Sustainability Today) Jodi, Well, not compounding your returns has the same sort of Catch 22 that doing great sustainable design and having the profits go to pumping up the world’s appetites does. You need to build a broader reason for doing the right thing. For sustainable design we definitely do

Posted to FRIAM 1/27/07 So I didn’t get takers on the question of what internal limits to growth apply when there are no external limits. It’s sort of a trick question. My approach to the answer has to do with the difference between physical and theoretical systems. Mostly we think about physical systems as if

post to FRIAM 1/20/07 marking a map to help navigating the sysems territory One of the things that Roger’s comments bring out about the discontinuities you find in tracing organism growth (epigenesis) is the question of markers. Normal single growth curves are famous for representing huge changes and having almost no markers at all to

posted to AIA COTE forum 1/20/07 Steering feedback systems is tricky… Anyone who has changed jobs and had to move investment accounts is familiar with the temptation to buy funds that are high, and just about to fall, and get rid of ones that are low, and just about to rise. Emotional first impressions are

Posted to [FRIAM] 1/13/07 ————————— Hugh, On thing worth adding is the reason it’s useful to consider the maze of instrumental behaviors that constitute systems in the context of the whole envelope of their developments (¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸)from beginning to end. It turns the mystery of complex developmental systems into the puzzle of when and

Posted to AIA COTE forum 1/11/07 A great old oak that’s been the center of it’s neighborhood for decades, home to wild life and children’s play, a long labor for leaf raking and thing of beauty in every season, began it’s life with exponential growth that was equally splendid in its transformative magic even if

Posted to the AIA Committee on the Environment Forum 1/6/07 …… It violates normality… but isn’t the more remarkable thingourrelative national silence about the whole torrent of authentic new evidence of rapid change in the climate ? No one anywhere seems to be up in arms about it, when beating the lag times is EVERYTHING